An eclectic crowd of arts aficionados gathered at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery on Friday February 12 to celebrate the launch of a group exhibition which focuses on the important and topical issue of climate change.

What if We Got it Wrong?, features the work of 15 Irish, and Irish based artists.

Deputy Lord Mayor of Armagh City, Banbridge and Craigavon, Councillor Catherine Seeley, welcomed guests which included a number of the participating artists who had travelled from Dublin, Leitrim and Belfast to celebrate the launch.

The exhibition is touring from the Centre Culturel Irlandais, (Irish Cultural Centre) in Paris where it was curated by Nora Hickey M’Sichili, Director of the CCI, in the lead up to the international COP21 Climate Conference in December 2015.

It marks the first collaboration between the Centure Culturel Irlandais, and the F.E. McWilliam Gallery as part of a new touring initiative devised by Nora Hickey M’Sichili who originates from Northern Ireland.

Nora Hickey M’Sichili, officially opened the exhibition and explained that What if We Got it Wrong?, which is taken from Lemn Sissay’s poem What If?, explores the idea that progress as we know it may have diminished us, making us weaker.

That somehow we might have taken a wrong turn and we may have made a serious mistake.

A central theme of the exhibition is the ice and waters of the Arctic, veritable barometers of the catastrophic effects of this ‘progress’.

A number of artists involved with the exhibition had travelled to the Artic to see the consequences global warming is having on the region at first hand.

The works also address the area of geopolitics and its direct links to questions of energy and biodiversity.

What if We Got it Wrong? brings the complexities and implications of climate change to the fore, proving a timely opportunity to explore how visual artists are engaging with one of the defining challenges of our time.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by Nora Hickey M’Sichili, Frank McDonald, Darragh McKeon and Katherine Waugh.

What if We Got it Wrong? continues at the F.E. McWilliam Gallery until Saturday April 16, 2016 before touring to Wexford Arts Centre, Wexford (May – June 2016), Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton (September – October 2016) and West Cork Arts Centre, Skibbereen (November – December 2016).